And someone finds her a minute later and accompanies her in.

She thanks them politely.

"...I have had an unpleasant couple of days and I'm not sure what to do."

"I'm sorry. Hug? Want to come in and talk about it?"

Nod. Hug.

Lúthien does not let go of her for a long time, then takes her hand and starts walking. "Let's go somewhere quiet and get some food."

"Sounds good."

They go back to Lúthien's rooms; one of them has some very soft couches, and someone brings bowls of fruit and nuts.

I went up to check out the Men, Loki says, a few fruits into the refreshments.

Oh! What are they like! All we have is the things the Maiar remember from the fate of the world.

They're three-week-old adults without any prior culture. They came with language skills and enough other procedural knowledge to move around and feed themselves, but they're still pretty weird to talk to. Other than that I think my guess that they're Midgardians without the soul animals was very close indeed. I taught some of them to count. I gave some of them magic rocks; I discovered that there's more to magic songs and that they work all right in illusion form, so now some groups of Men will be warm at night and have healing if something happens to them.

That's good of you. ...wait, can you send them mine? For crops growing and being happy and energized, I can't do healing yet.

I have a crop one, and they didn't have any actual cultivation I could apply it to, and in order to have an illusion of the other I'd have to listen to it. I'll give you a copy of the healing one attached to something if you like, though. And it occurred to me that I should probably find out if I can transfer my sorcery information and the safest way to do that is probably to try to teach you a healing spell.

She beams. I'd like that.

Well, it'll take a long time to go through the entire spell, but let's see if you can even get anything out of a 'letter'... And Loki attempts to compose in transferable osanwë form the irreducible Tesseract-granted concept of the "first" symbol, the one she assigned to the number one back when she was developing a way to write in her new schema.

She gets the symbol, but it is not magically imprinted on her mind as the Tesseract did it.

Okay. Well, that does tell me something, anyway, I knew other sorcerers didn't have indelible memories for their spells but I was never sure if it was because they weren't working from the ground up or because that's a separate ability the Tesseract gave me. You might still be able to use some of my magic but it would be very hard and depend heavily on your unassisted memory for quality and function.

So, when I was by the Men, I saw some of them building stone buildings, and I thought, oh, how clever, three weeks and they've already figured out stone construction, go, Men!, and I went and asked them what it was for and they said someone had come by and suggested building a temple to Melkor.

Oh no.

Yep. The temple, and a hymn that they willingly demonstrated for me, are both supposed to protect them from "demons". Their concept of demons is a little confused - they think there are demons in a forest full of Nandor nearby, who don't like Men and try to scare them away but disclaim involvement in the reported eviscerations; and they also classify werewolves, which I saw, and some other creatures, which I did not see, as demons.

Is the hymn magic? Are the temples?

The hymn did not seem to be directly magic - it had no visible effect, anyway, and when the werewolves started swarming all over the Men's settlements I stuck a copy of the song in one's ear and it didn't turn away. It seems likeliest that the fellow managing the werewolves is just telling them to turn away from temples and hymn-singing Men.